


As Long As Breath Dwells

by DinosaurTheology



Series: Johnny and Dora [6]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Conversations, F/M, Gun Violence, Gunshot Wounds, Hospitalization, Injury, Major Character Injury, Soul-Searching, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 23:38:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6929029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Det. Rosa Diaz is seriously injured during a bust gone wrong. She remembers some things, tries to forget a few others and does a little soul searching. Jake is a good guy to do it with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Long As Breath Dwells

**Author's Note:**

> Brooklyn 99 isn't mine but when real life gets in the way of my writing like it has this month--torn between an awesome FD job and an equally awesome EMS job--I do horrible things to really nice characters that I love.

Sister Magdalene Clementa had taught health and wellness education to Catholic students in Brooklyn for almost forty years before Rosa Diaz encountered her at Archbishop Molloy High School in the late nineties. She was a tall, forbidding woman who had instructed cannibals on basic hygiene in Papua New Guinea (that's what some of the senior girls whispered in the changing rooms, at least, and a poor little freshman like Rosa Scar-face could make neither heads nor tails of what might have been true or not) and been a combat nurse in war zones like El Salvador and Bosnia and the Congo and shit. Really heavy stuff.

On the other hand, however, that didn't make her biased understanding of the relationships between men and women any less terrifying for the ranks of fourteen year old girls trapped in stifling, pale rooms. They sat in their cramped desks, mostly pristine because who on this earth or any other place would dare scribble on a desk guarded by these fierce Franciscan sisters, and listened to her Jeremiad on the dangers of premarital sex.

In addition to the usual host of terrors represented by venereal disease (each of them from AIDS to chlamydia described in graphic, lingering, almost loving detail) and what she called "the nine month flu," Sister Magdalene had described how awful that the act of sex--celebrated foolishly, as she put it, in both verse and prose--could really be. And she had seen enough of the world, she assured her terrified charges--Rosa sat with dark eyes wide and huge, small hands shaking in her lap--that they ought to trust her on these things. She had suffered, much like Christ, so they didn't have to.

"It's all just meat," she said. "Meat cramming against itself." She rapped her knuckles on the desk of a girl in the front row (Rosa thanked a God she sort of feared that these nuns had made her so terrified of that she sat near the back) and posed this question. "Does your mother ever make meatloaf, Miss Munoz?"

"Yes, Sister," she said.

"And does that get you excited, Miss Munoz? Is making meatloaf something you would trade your immortal soul for?"

"No, Sister."

She offered this good, tractable girl one of her rare smiles. "Then if you don't get excited by that meat getting squashed together then this meat shouldn't do it either, eh?" She shuddered. "I've seen enough meat doing things it oughtn't for a lifetime abroad, my girls... it's why I'm a vegetarian now."

She went on, warm to the subject and with no intention of stopping. "It's not a thing of beauty, my girls, though some of you must be cursed with it to be blessed with the beautiful babies you'll eventually want to give your husbands and the Church. You'll see when it happens, and warn you though I might it will. You'll think back to old Sister Magdalene and remember how I said that all this romance doesn't amount to much more than a searing rush of pain between your legs, a little bit of blood and the dank, musky stink of a human body hovering over you."

Rosa had gone on from that room, just like all those girls, to relationships with a few men in more than one position and found that it was not nearly so bad as Sister Magdalene made it all out to be. Her first boyfriend, for example, had been a kid named Derek and didn't smell like anything except some really shitty teenage guy cologne called Really Ripped Abs. It came in a blue bottle with a spray-top, like Windex, and they'd fumbled their way through something a little more like love making than it wasn't in the back of his 1985 Honda Accord after his school's homecoming game. She couldn't remember his last name, or where he'd gone to school, to save her life but this was after she'd transferred to the American Ballet Academy from Archbishop Molloy.

She got over the Sister's grave, strange warning but wonders, from time to time, if it's why she can't make a real relationship work with a real man. It doesn't matter if he's the nicest guy in the world, like Marcus, or... well, whatever the fuck Adrian is. Something, some block, climbs into the way. She is not sure but strongly suspects that it is nun shaped.

You really think the weirdest shit, Rosa reflects, when you're pretty sure that you are dying.

It happened outside a cookhouse that they didn't know was one nestled between Crown Heights and Bushwick. They're not quite Vinegar Hill but, yeah. Neither is exactly where you want to serve a warrant, even for something simple like failure to appear, and the gentlemen inside had possessed not a whit of interest in allowing any of their friends to make a visit to the Kings County Supreme Court. It was, apparently, just not how the _esés_ in Bushwick liked to carry out business, dig?

She didn't really register how bad it was when the .308 slug from a short hunting rifle buried itself in the gap in protection where her arm poked through the kevlar vests they habitually wore on these runs since Amy's close call a few months back. Just a thud, like being punched, then burning when she tried to breathe, an overwhelming urge to sit down for a few minutes and Terry's huge, gentle hands--slick with blood--cupping her face.

"Come on, Diaz," he says. "You can't go like this. Members of the 99 aren't allowed to die like this. We are too beautiful to die."

"W-what about... Scully?" she manages. It wants to come around a pink bubble. That's bad news. Shit.

"Well," Terry says, "he'll probably die on the toilet. Or choke to death on a peanut. But that's different."

Jake takes two shots at the skells harassing them from a second story window, turns and grimaces. "How's she look, Sarge?"

"Great, Peralta. Just peachy."

"Really? Cause she sorta looks like shit to me, Sarge," he says. "Sorta drawn and pale--almost green."

It takes a truly Herculean effort but she raises a middle finger to him and says, "Fuck you." The next cough is deep, racking, awful and it feels like something tears under her ribs. Red pulmonary blood does spill bright down her chin this time. That's not good.

Terry knows it. Jake does too. "We're gonna have to do something about this, Sarge. She won't make it until our 13s and the 97 get here."

"I know," he says.

It sucks that they're talking like she isn't even here but... it can't be helped. She's floating in and out anyway, somewhere between this dirty street in Bushwick and the nice little apartment in Cypress Hills where she'd visited Abuelita when she was just a tiny girl with pigtails and long, dark curls that frame her face. " _Mi Rosita_ ," she can hear the old lady, dead ten years, saying. " _Tan bonita, pero tan grave. Oro para que aprenda a sonreír_ ."

She smiles these days--on occasion, especially when some moke has eaten a big plateful of her fist--but can't even crack a little one now. Breathing hurts, not breathing would hurt worse and she knows that it's bad business when you start hearing dead relatives. She concentrates on her living friends instead.

"All right," Terry says. "I'm gonna put her on my shoulders and run like hell. You cover us, all right?"

Jake nods. "I'll serve those bastards up some PB&J."

He winces. "That's cold."

He shrugs. "That's the best way to serve a revenge dish... or at least that's what Ricardo Montalban has told me every time I've watched the Wrath of Khan. And, let's face it, Mr. Roarke hasn't lied to me yet so I tend to believe him."

"Hey, I'm not disagreeing," Terry says. "Just... be careful. Don't get all crazy. Just cover us, get your head down and get the hell out, all right? You've got somebody waiting on you."

"Sure. You be careful too, Sarge. And with her. This is... well, they say don't move injured people, right? Those FD snot-hobbits act like you're a freaking terrorist if you so much as put a band-aid on someone without six months of training in emergency medicine, three pump wagons and an aerial ladder.

"We're the NYPD, baby. We've got to make do with guts and gorgeousness."

"We just don't wanna make it worse is all I'm saying."

"I know, Jake," he says. "I'll be careful. But if I don't move this injured person she's gonna be a dead person. I think they'll understand just this once."

"If not we'll buy em a brand new remote control toy fire engine with real ladders and hoses that actually squirt. It'll keep those guys happy for hours. So.. . you ready?"

"Not on your life. You?"

"Never. So let's do this thing."

They do. Rosa is certain it's a thrilling escape, would love to see how it actually goes down, but is hit with an enormous rush of agony when Terry hauls her over his massive shoulder in a fireman's carry. She does not know anything again until she awakens to early morning sunlight in a hospital room. She would call it, if she was pressed to guess, Lutheran Medical Center. This is Brooklyn's level 1 trauma center and she can't think of a cop who doesn't know of at least one member of the thin blue line who has fallen and, for better or worse, been under the care of the surgeons and nurses here.

Jake sits beside her bed in an uncomfortable chair, seems to have been there for hours judging by the dark bags under his eyes. He leans forward, fingers laced under his chin, and says, "Hey, you."

"Hey," she says. God her throat hurts. Her voice is a whiskey and cigarettes growl straight out of Courtney Love's dream recording session. "Been good company?"

"The best!" he says. "You had a breathing tube, and you coded a couple of times and Gina totally stole the pudding cup from the dinners they brought even though you were unconscious and couldn't eat them. It was super fun."

"Sounds like. Sorry I missed it. Mostly because I was, you know, in a coma or some shit."

"That's no excuse for missing a good time, dude. We were having a serious party out here. There were dancers and an elephant. The elephant danced too. He came out of a cake. A strawberry cake. Epic."

She smiles. It feels weird on her face, but when doesn't it? "Must be why I don't feel rested even though it's been... how long was I out?"

"A week."

"Feels like a year. Has everyone been here to see me?"

"We've all checked in. Doug Judy even sent flowers for his 'sweet, spicy mamacita.' You didn't do any tricks or anything, though. You were a terrible hostess." He wags his finger. "For shame."

She raises another finger back at him. "You know what to do with this, smartass."

"Er... kiss it and make it better?"

She rolls her eyes. "That'll work, sure. Was Adrian here?"

"It's kind of one of those long stories."

She grimaces. "Not at all, then?"

"Not quite. After he figured out that the moke who shot you was already... incapacitated... he never left until he collapsed a few minutes ago. Now he's in a room of his own. It was exciting! And, plus, you guys have something else in common now. Apart from, you know, wearing lots of black and being kind of scary."

"Ah... so he cares about me then."

"Well, you're supposed to be getting married so I kind of hope so, right?"

"Ha ha, loser." She tries to run a hand through her curls, finds it impossible with the IVs still attached to her forearm. "I am going to rib him about this for literally the rest of our lives."

"Now that is the sign of a healthy relationship. Rosa Diaz, I applaud you."

She actually laughs--Jake is one of only two or three people in the world who can make her do it on the regular, damn him--and figures out in short order that it's a bad idea. When the grabbing pain beneath her arm subsides she says, "Speaking of healthy relationships when is Amy gonna make an honest man out of you? Do I need to beat her up or something?"

"Hey now. That's the mother of my dynasty you're talking about."

"Okay, so maybe I'll just intimdate her a little bit. No biggie."

"Aw, you're getting soft on me."

They rest for a few moments in the companionable silence that only the oldest of comrades can manage. She likes it. No chatter save the damnable beeping of her blood pressure cuff distracts her from the glow of someone you really trust nearby. The only thing missing is a bottle or two of something cold but she's pretty sure that the nurses at Lutheran Medical wouldn't feel too sanguine about that in one of their rooms. The bitches.

Finally she says, "I'm serious, though. You two have a good thing going. Life is... well, you know. You see the same fucked up stuff I do every other day. And it can end really fast. Like..." She works on snapping her fingers a few times, finally gives it up as something beyond her at the moment. "Just like that, though. One crackhead with a rifle gets lucky before he gets really unlucky and it's all done. I want things to work out with Adrian. I love him. Like you said I'm supposed to be marrying the guy. But I just don't know. Sometimes I feel like there's something broken in me from way back, like I can't love the way I should." She sighs. "I could blame it on a lot of people but it's not really their fault. It's just... part of me, I guess, like this scar on my eyebrow. You don't have that problem and Amy doesn't either, even if she's a nerd queen. So don't waste something good, dude, and don't let her waste it either. Promise me."

He does, with his eyes if not his lips, and then laces his fingers between hers. She has not noticed until now that they are shaking and pain has crept across her ribs. It'll be time to press the red button soon, the one that says "Morphine: For Patient Use Only" right below it, but for now she can rest a little bit. Even the discomfort isn't as awful with a warm palm pressed against hers and sometimes a real friend can communicate so much without a single word. She's always believed it and hears, in her heart if nowhere else, that what's broken can be fixed and that as long as breath dwells then hope does too.


End file.
